The Woman in the Moon

he
German film director Fritz Lang made a number of spectacular and
influential silent films - I wrote about Spione in an earlier post -
though after he moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s he was never as effective.
His last silent film, Frau im Mond (1929) (The Woman in the Moon)
has now been released on DVD by Eureka
Video.

It's in many ways a clumsy film,
and very slowly paced (running 2 hours 43 minutes). The first hour and a quarter
are taken up with the plans for the spaceship being stolen by a consortium who
wants to gain control of the gold the voyagers expect to find on the moon, and
their forcing the scientist, Helius (Willy Fritsch) to accept their dubious
representative 'Turner' (Fritz Rasp) on board. There is also a love triangle
between Helius, his assistant engineer, Windegger (Gustav von Wagenheim) and
Windegger's fiancee, Friede (Gerda
Maurus).

The
next forty minutes detail the preparation and firing of the rocket, and the
space flight. Lang, who also co-wrote the script with his wife, Thea von Harbou,
had the co-operation of a rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, and though rocket
science was very much in its infancy the scientific background was carefully
researched. The result is surprisingly prophetic, with a three-stage rocket
lifting the moon-landing module very much as in the real moon landing forty
years later: there are some understandable errors - the rocket is partially
immersed in water before takeoff to increase stability (it would surely have
made the stability worse); and the take-off is sudden - no-one could have
foreseen the sight of a Saturn rocket standing on its tail and lifting slowly. A
reasonable shot is made at representing weightlessness on the voyage; the
controls are more reminiscent of an electricity generating station than a
spaceship, but again given the period this is reasonable
enough.

There
are tensions between the crew - Helius and Windegger, both in love with Friede,
who has insisted on coming, an elderly scientist, and Turner, the slimy
representative of the consortium - and the discovery of a stowaway, a small boy
with an obsession about space travel gained from cheap comics. Despite some
variable special effects, the landing is shown convincingly (if rather fast -
the speed of landing would have smashed the module) and the lunar surface is
represented by hundreds of tons of sand imported into the studio (though the
backdrop of the mountains does look rather like something out of
Méliès).

Unfortunately as
this point the film takes a lurch away from scientific accuracy into comic-book
melodrama with the discovery of a breathable atmosphere. Lang must have know the
moon was airless, but I suppose the main problem was the difficulty of having
everyone in spacesuits. There is a good deal of over-acting: Windegger becomes
more and more cowardly and hysterical: he fights with Turner, who is killed but
who damages the oxygen reserve with a pistol shot. As a result someone has to
stay behind: Windegger is chosen by lot but reacts so hysterically that Helius
drugs him and (leaving the boy to pilot the ship) stays behind with a tent and
supplies in the hope of being rescued: he discovers that Friede has also
stayed.

All arrant nonsense, but still
enjoyable; the film really stands on its central section, which introduced, for
purely dramatic reasons, the count-down which has become standard on all rocket
launches. The film also had an unintended effect: Oberth had been unable to get
funding for his experiments, but the interest provoked by the film gained him
enough funding to carry out serious developments (among his assistants was a
young Wehrner von Braun). Eight years later the Nazis suppressed the film
because it was too close for comfort to the ballistic rocket weapons they were
developing, which became the V1 and V2 rocket bombs of
1944/5.

Eureka's print is excellent,
crisp and detailed and with remarkably few marks: the piano score is just barely
adequate, though I wish they'd tuned the piano better - perhaps someone thought
silent films ought to be accompanied on a tatty piano. Eureka know better than
that.